The Contaminated Vision
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indicate almost no appreciation for the debilitating effects of alcohol addiction
and its universal effect on society as a whole, and it certainly ignores Crane’s
incisive and irrefutable perspective on the crippling and very unromantic nature
of alcohol dependence.
Alcohol is well known for its capacity to generate irrational mood
swings. In most cases, the first one or two drinks will usually result in a certain
amount of euphoria and a feeling of well-being. However, each successive drink
typically acts as a depressant and will usually manifest an increasingly severe
downward spiral leading to melancholia, antisocial behavior, and, in extreme
cases, delirium tremens. “The Wine Menagerie” presents a vivid portrait of that
inevitable downward spiral as the writer-intoxicant, who is completely unaware
of the irrational texture of his perceptions, progresses from euphoria to
depression to such a frightening menagerie of hallucinations that he is rendered
nearly helpless and is compelled to flee the saloon in horror.
The poem begins on an almost fatalistic note coupled with the poetdrinker’s dubious affirmation of the regenerative effects of wine:
Invariably when wine redeems the sight,
Narrowing the mustard scansion of the eyes,
A leopard ranging always in the brow
Asserts a vision in the slumbering gaze. (1-4)
Of course, there is nothing to suggest that the intoxicant’s vision of poetic feet in
a line of mustard jars facing the bar could truly signify a leopard-like mutation
to predatory liberation, much as he might want to think otherwise. In point of
fact, it is just about impossible to make sense of the fantasy, except that it has
been generated from an intoxicant’s perspective, which would necessarily be
foolish and irrational. In this regard, the poet-drinker is not unlike most
intoxicants in claiming some kind of euphoric transposition to brilliance while
under the influence; but, in this case, his feline genius seems to border on the
ludicrous, as jars morph into a condiment scansion while his muddled brain
watches itself watching its inner self mutate to a leopard who will prowl the
saloon in search of literary visions.1
In the next stanza, the intoxicant fixes on something more compelling
and, from an alcoholic’s standpoint, a good deal more fascinating: the wine
decanters and his reflected image in their glittering bellies:
Then glozening decanters that reflect the street
|Wear me in crescents in their bellies. Slow
|Applause flows into liquid cynosures:
—I am conscripted to their shadows’ glow. (5-8)
Here Crane presents another commonplace symptom of unassailable
drunkenness as the self-obsessed persona progresses from condiments to wine
jugs and the wonderment of his reflective displacement to the street in a series of
bulbous crescents. However, it is likely that the reflecting jugs are no